Meet Tomás Ryan, a postdoctoral researcher in the Nobel prize winning lab of Susumu Tonegawa. Ryan grew up in A small market town called Dungarvan in Country Waterford, Ireland. He will soon lead his own laboratory at Trinity College in Dublin. When asked about the future of neuroscience, Ryan responded “we are at a stage in neuroscience where we have a sudden abundance of fantastic new experimental techniques that will define this decade. These new technologies have not, however, significantly advanced our understanding of the brain. As a field were are still attached to old, speculative, and often untenable theories about brain function and how it relates to behavior. The received wisdom is that we have been limited in neuroscience by the crudeness of our experimental tools, and if we just improve the tools then we will understand the brain. It think this is wrong. We do need new tools, and many fantastic engineers and methods experts are inventing techniques that we could not have imagined even a decade ago. But it is equally important to challenge the dogma, and to use the new methods (and old) to conduct imaginative investigative research into the central questions of neuroscience, and then to verify and expand on the answers derived from data in a meaningful way.” @tomas.ryan1 @mitscience #MITBrains #sarinana #eyeemoninstagram This project is supported by The Council for the @artsatmit @new55film and @mobilephotoawards (at Picower Institute for Learning and Memory)
